Sunday, 24 August 2014

The Virgin Birth and the Resurrection: Subverting Patriarchy

I’ve
just returned from a day at Greenbelt where one of the most interesting
sessions I attended was a panel discussion exploring whether we can re-imagine
marriage. This was chaired by Vicky Beeching, who rightly received a standing
ovation on arrival for her bravery in recently coming out. Her panellists were
Linda Woodhead, Sarah Miles and Robert Song.

Linda
Woodhead briefly summarised the history of approaches to marriage within Church
history. All marriages were civil contracts until part-way through the medieval
period, only becoming predominantly church ceremonies at the Reformation.
Affirmation of the nuclear family is much more recent phenomenon with the
Church. The Church has, therefore, viewed a spectrum of relationships – some formal,
some informal – as marriage across its history, with celibacy often being the
primary stance recommended. Since the 1970s, the numbers marrying within our
society have been in decline, while within these numbers civil marriage has
grown significantly. One consequence has been that society is accepting of a greater
diversity of relationships.

Sarah
Miles spoke from her own experience of same-sex marriages as a sign of the
radical inclusion to which Jesus’ ministry points. God’s love is at work to
bind all people together and equal marriage can be a sign of this reality.

Robert
Song suggested that sex before Christ is not the same as sex after Christ. Much
of our thinking about marriage is based on the creation patterning of Genesis 1
and 2 and this is also the case with Jewish identity which is based on genealogy.
In Christ, however, membership of God’s people is not based on shared ancestral
blood but on the blood of Christ, and, as a result, the hope of having children
is not intrinsic to the Christian community (as demonstrated by its affirmation
of celibacy). In Christ, procreation is no longer central. The resurrection
changes everything. If there is no death, there is also no need for birth or
marriage. Therefore, Jesus said that in heaven there is no marriage. This makes
non-procreative covenant partnerships possible – with a focus on faithfulness, permanence
and fruitfulness - as a third vocation (after marriage and celibacy).

For
me, this made connections with some of my thinking and reading during my
sabbatical. On my sabbatical I visited lots of churches which were dedicated to
Our Lady and, as a result, had thought rather more than usual about her
significance for Christianity. Martin Jay in ‘Force Fields’ suggests that the
monotheistic religions of Judaism and Christianity sought to replace “their
mother-goddess predecessors with a stern patriarchal deity.” At times on my
sabbatical the Protestant in me has wanted to argue that if that is so, the
significance that Mary gained within Catholicism, in particular, could be seen
as an attempt to redress the balance and reintroduce a mother-goddess to
Christianity.

As
a counter-balance, though, I’ve also seen a number of churches and chapels
dedicated to St Joseph. At Aylesford Priory, where I had my first sabbatical
retreat, St Joseph’s Chapel contains the following inscription: ‘The wise and
faithful servant set over your family as guardian and fosterfather of Jesus
Christ our Lord.’

One
of the art books that I read during my sabbatical offers a different and more
helpful perspective on the Virgin Birth and patriarchy which is, I think,
closer to the subversive nature of Jesus’ words and actions. It seems to me
that the significance of the argument which Thierry De Duve advances in
‘Re-Enchantment’ begins with the existence of two creation stories at the
beginning of Genesis. In the first, men and women are created equal while in
the other the woman is created by God from the man's rib as a help-meet to him
and is named by him as well as taken in the context of marriage. The second
story, therefore, institutes or confirms patriarchy. The primary purpose of patriarchy
is to assure the man of the legitimacy of his offspring.

De
Duve quotes Amelia Jones: “Patriarchy's investment in systems that ensure proof
of authorial possession results from the necessity of overcoming male anxiety
over the ultimate uncertainty of biological paternity. Although the woman
always knows she is the mother - through her physical connection with the
developing foetus - the man never knows for sure that he is the father, and
thus has a high stake in maintaining a system by which he can claim paternal
‘ownership’.”

Genealogy
plays a very important role in Patriarchial systems. The Ancestors of Christ windows at Canterbury Cathedral originally consisted of eighty-six life-sized
seated patriarchs of the Old Testament, largely based on the list of names
contained in the Gospel of St Luke (III, 23–28) and interpolated with
additional names from the Gospel of St Matthew (I, 1–17). It was the largest
known series of the genealogy of Christ in medieval art and the images
represent his male biblical genealogy, beginning with Adam and coming forward
to King David, from whom Mary and Joseph are said to descend. Matthew’s
genealogy is, of course, strange in that it is traced through the ancestry of
Joseph who, by virtue of the Virgin Birth, did not have a blood relationship to
Jesus.

The
anomaly of Jesus’ genealogy may highlight a different perspective i.e. that the
Virgin Birth subverts patriarchy. Joseph is not the father and does not know
whether Mary has slept with another man or not. The Joseph-based genealogy of
Jesus is by adoption only. A different role is asked of Joseph from that of the
Patriarch. As the inscription in the St Joseph’s Chapel at Aylesford Priory
reads: ‘The wise and faithful servant set over your family as guardian and
fosterfather of Jesus Christ our Lord.’

De
Duve suggests: “The great invention, the great coup of Christianity, is to
short-circuit all this [i.e. patriarchal ownership through genealogies] … the
production line of sons is brought to a sudden halt … And the status of woman
changes drastically … Virgin and mother, rather than virgin and then mother!
and then mother-in-law, and then grandmother, and then old. This means that her
function is no longer to take her place in the production line that fabricates
sons. One Son is enough. He will have no offspring. He will save the world
instead …”

Jesus'
birth occurs outside of or at a tangent to the Patriarchal system. He is a man
who doesn’t marry and who has no physical offspring - the furtherance of his
'seed' is of no interest to him. His emphasis is on his followers as his
family, rather than his blood and adoptive relatives. His death is for the
entire family of God - all people everywhere.

On
the one hand, this seems a part of what it means that: “if anyone is in Christ,
he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come.” Also,
as St Paul suggests in his discussion of marriage, the new situation created by
Christ means that it is better not to marry. Physical offspring is now less
important than bringing people into the family of God and the make-up of that
family takes us back to that first creation story as in Christ there is neither
Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free; all are equal.

Putting
De Duve and Song’s arguments together, therefore, suggests that both the Virgin
Birth and the Resurrection subvert the patriarchal system and the necessity of
creating physical offspring in families meaning that, in the present,
relational and family structures in society can be diverse while in the future
family of God, marriage is no longer necessary and equality will be the norm.

About Me

Between

This is a blog written while trying to live creatively between the times; between the death and resurrection of Christ and the expected consummation signified by the Kingdom of God. It features the people and things that inspire me to live creatively in the tension of the now and the not yet.
This blog is dedicated to the memory of my brother, Nick Evens, who died, together with 23 other aid workers and plane staff, when their UN-chartered plane crashed in Kosovo in 1999. Ex-59 commando, youthworker and firefighter, Nick had been working in Kosovo with Tear Fund's Disaster Response Team.